What Automotive Companies Are Showing At CES Asia: Electric, Hydrogen, And Autonomy, Of Course

Wandering the halls of CES Asia it's easy to spot the automotive companies, but sometimes you have to look at the logos instead of looking for actual vehicles on display. The booths here at the show in Shanghai, China are full of global and domestic brands showing off everything from self-driving vehicles to futuristic concepts to useful doo-dads for today's cars. In addition to the Byton K-Byte unveiling that happened off-site the day before (and covered here), here's a sampling of what else was at the show.

The focus of the automakers here at @CESAsia is obviously not on the cars themselves, but on mobility. You hear this a lot, but to see the @Honda booth with no actual cars in it really drives that home. pic.twitter.com/3Awf4FgCKt

Just because Honda didn't have any actual vehicles on display is not to say that every company wanted to promote mobility ideas over cars. Hyundai, for example, had an impressive cut-out of its upcoming Nexo fuel cell CUV, and was certainly all-in on the hydrogen message.

Daimler, on the other hand, was here to promote its sharing future. The evolution of the Car2go idea was represented by the "Proud To Share" slogan and the Smart Vision EQ Fortwo concept that was also seen at the American CES in Las Vegas earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the domestic brands – BYD, LeapMotor, GAC, and others – were almost exclusively showing their all-electric and plug-in hybrid models. This makes sense, since there is still a very real and very big push in China for electric cars.

The iSpace living room/van thing really dominates the #GAC booth here at @CESAsia, given its inviting doors and interesting windshield. Unlike anything on the road today, that's for sure. pic.twitter.com/y2cazLlYpb

While the other halls featured plenty of new headphones, dancing robots, smart home technologies, and other visions of the future, there were some that straddled the line between then and now. Bluetooth gesture control devices for hands-free phone access while driving, for example.

In the end, CES Asia is a good example of just how many different visions of our automotive future there are, while also showing that these ideas are fairly similar across the developed world. Which ones come to pass will be something to discuss at the CES shows in the future.

I have been writing about electric vehicles, hybrids, and hydrogen since 2006. My articles and reviews have appeared on most of the big green car blogs, Automotive News, The New York Times, Car Talk, and other places. I believe the shift away from gasoline-powered vehicles i...